Monday, May 18, 2009

26 Year War in Sri Lanka Ends

[Tamil Tiger rebel chief, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, currently toast]

From today's NY Times

The government information service sent a text message to cellphones across the country on Monday saying that Mr. Prabhakaran was dead, and state television broke into regular programming to announce the news.

But hours later General Fonseka said the military was still trying to identify Mr. Prabhakaran’s body among the corpses on the battlefield, The Associated Press reported.

In contrast to the sense of overwhelming military victory in Sri Lanka, outsiders continued to register concerns about how the battle had been fought.

Foreign ministers of the European Union, meeting in Brussels, said they were “appalled” by reports of high civilian casualties and urged an independent inquiry into alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by both sides.

So Lincoln announced that Lee had surrendered at Appomattox by sending text messages to everybody's cellphones. Ulysses S. Grant announced that the Union Army had the body of Jefferson Davis, except they didn't.

The EU ministers got together to carp that the Union and the Confederacy had conducted themselves as though what they were doing was a war and not a game. Which made everyone respect the ministers and take them seriously.

Anonymous makes an interesting point. But there have been modern wars that ended decisively. The Cold War is over. All communist insurgencies everywhere are over. They used to be all over the place. Malaysia, Peru, Algeria, Philippines, Angola, India, Congo, Colombia, El Salvador, Cambodia, Laos, Berkeley.

The left always claimed they were caused by unjust social conditions. But in retrospect they seem to have vanished when the Soviet Union did.

One wonders which regimes would have to go under for the Palestinian war against Israel to go away?